1. 164 | sep/oct 2016 | ISSUE 100
ZHU JINSHI
Wall of Air
2015
Canvas, frame, oil paint and metal rack,
ten parts: 250.2 x 201.6 x 7.9 cm each.
Eight of ten parts exhibited.
Courtesy the artist and Blum &
Poe, Los Angeles/New York.
los angeles
Blum & Poe
In 1915, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich
exhibited Black Square (1913), arguably the
most renowned black painting in modern art
history. Shocking audiences with its reticent
form and color, Malevich’s composition revealed
itself to be much more—a revolutionary break
from representational forms of art. A century
after Black Square, Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe
gallery brought together three diverse artists
that similarly treat black as a portal to myriad
possibilities. Though black is often thought of
as tantamount to nothingness, all three of these
artists counter that perception by asserting the
potential inherent in blackness.
Known for colorful, thickly impastoed
canvases, Berlin-based Zhu Jinshi sees black not
as a void, but, in accordance with Taoist precepts,
the culmination of five colors: blue, red, green,
white and yellow. In the gallery’s first room, his
massive installation, Wall of Air (2015), bisected
the expanse of the space. The ominous work,
made up of ten, approximately eight-by-seven-
foot conjoined black canvases (though only eight
were on view at Blum & Poe), rose up at a slight
angle and leaned against sturdy metal racks
on rolling casters. The partition has an almost
pulsating surface that, though intimidating,
paradoxically draws one closer for inspection.
The craquelure in the thick paint are splintered
like cracking skin. Throughout the run of the
exhibition, in an outcome unexpected even to
Zhu himself, an oily yellow substance leached out
from the paintings and dripped and pooled on the
gallery floor. The monolithic blockade ultimately
displayed its vulnerabilities and, consequently,
the impermanent nature of all things, no matter
how formidable.
The second room was filled with paintings by
Quentin Morris, who has been exclusively using
black in his work for more than five decades.
The timing of the artist’s beginning his all-black
aesthetic in 1963 is significant, that being the
year Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic
“I Have a Dream” speech, and just one year
before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended
segregation in the United States. As a black
man living in the US, where race issues remain
fraught, Morris has sought to dispel unfavorable
connotations surrounding the term “black.”
Presented against the gallery’s walls, which
were also black, Morris’s work, all untitled and
created between 2014–16, almost appeared to be
camouflaged. Approaching the work, however,
revealed the paintings to be uniquely different
from the dark walls. For each work, gesso was
applied to a raw, circular canvas—Morris eschews
frames and stretcher bars for the immediacy of
the canvas upon the wall—after which acrylic
and silkscreen ink were used to blot out the
white substrate. Weather and other conditions
of Morris’s Philadelphia basement studio also
made an impact on the finished products, as some
paintings bore a cracked pattern resulting from
humidity. The paintings were hung in such a way
that they were just short of being flush against
the wall, allowing for physics to flex and curl the
free edges. The expressionistic surfaces and shade
variances interplayed with ambient light to reveal
subtle yet significant differences that were as
individual as one human being is from another.
In the gallery’s final space, Kōji Enokura—a key
member of the avant-garde Mono-ha movement
from 1960s and ’70s Japan—presented a selection
of canvases variously treated with black pigment.
Similar to Morris’s works, Enokura’s Figure A – No.
1 (1982) bypasses backing panels and stretcher
bars. A saturated cotton cloth was, instead, affixed
directly to the wall and floor of the gallery, taking
on the appearance of a rectangular cast shadow.
In Intervention No. 1 (1987), a large canvas stained
all in black except for its left top corner has a
wood beam half-doused in blue paint leaning
against it, the latter seemingly a surrogate for
the human body. Enokura explains in various
exhibition catalogs from the 1980s that his
aim was to document his own presence during
uncertain times. These “black” works, in essence,
act as tangible confirmations of the artist’s
sentient being. Indeed, it was clear that all of the
exhibition’s artists—Zhu, Morris and Enokura—do
not view black as a void but, rather, as a powerful,
physical presence.
Jennifer S. Li
black